I just can't see players who look up guides as "hardcore". In fact, I would say they are being lazy rather than hardcore - there's no learning the mechanics or figuring out what's best yourself. You are essentially allowing others to do the work for you. World Firsts where they have no knowledge to draw from, wipe after wipe to learn and figure out the phases and chances, breaking down fights, figuring out skills and optimal ways to use them. That sounds hardcore to me.
The whole game is designed around "being casual", they designed this with the mentality that first time MMO player can pick it up and enjoy the game. The "look up strategy", "learn the mechanics before even enter for the first time", they belong to the more hardcore group.
Sure there are hardcore FC that aim for server first, but majority of the players are happy to clear Coil before next tier come in, and in many cases, people don't even clear current tier.
To me yolo pulling a bos is the exact opposite of what "hardcore" means.
Hardcore plane things, now what they will encounter. Are prepared.
But it's nice to have a group willing to blindly pull a boss. Makes some fun experience.
I would break down in tears if Warcraft ever got the equivalent to the giant Tonberry that'll one shot you in The Wanderer'd Palace. Tears of laughter.
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
Thats amazing ! Part of the mmo experience should be to experience things yourself. The moment you watch guides on how to kill a boss, that's the moment you lost part of the fun that most people nowadays don't even know exist when they play WoW, for instance.
At the end of the day, I do not think thats a sign of the community being hardcore, on the contrary, this " read the guide, watch the fight, come prepared " thing, is a sign of pseudo hardcore roots that exist in WoW players nowadays.
I guess ever since Illidan, people just gotta go prepared or else..
Yes, I was trying to match the stupidity of your explanation of hardcore, I'm competitive by nature. I'm only busting your chops because of my last group during my roulette, Gaurda, where we died as people failed every possible mechanic until I left 7 wipes later without even getting close to the final phase. Three of them said entered and instantly said, "I don't like spoilers, so I didn't watch a video and I don't want an explanation."
Comparing a full group of people who have played together for years in order to get a world first, playing multiple days with little down time on content launch, to the average player is just...ignorant. Expecting your group of random members to carry you while you "learn" doesn't make you hardcore, it makes you lazy and bad. You're not lazy for looking up what to do and not wasting other peoples time, you are lazy for not doing it though. Basically, your idea of hardcore is actually just being bad and using an excuse to explain the badness. Unless you play for days straight upon content release going for world first. Which is .01% of the population and statistically irrelevant.
TL : DR For the .01% you are correct, they're about as hardcore as it gets. For basically everyone in the world you couldn't be more wrong if you actively tried.
I think a lot of it comes from the FFXI community being a different kind of 'hardcore' and a majority of them switching to FFXIV when it got fixed up.
In FFXI, we (me and the 3 or so Linkshells ((guilds)) that I played with over the years) would just turn up at boss locations, Dynamis locations, mission areas and so on and just play the game. There were very few and shaky guides on how to do any of the bosses for a long time, even on places like Killingifrit and Bluegarter. Almost everyone who got to end-game play just learnt how to do things and how to get to places by playing. I actually mapped out the travel paths for roaming NPCs in Sky and spent (sadly and literally) 12+ hour periods camping rare spawning NPCs.
The entire mind-set for the FF online games is just different, as a whole, the player base is more willing to learn and experiment with things. As a Monk in FFXI, I went from using MND stacked, 12xBoosted Chi-Blasts to deal DPS to using rapid melee burn methods as Linkshells learnt, adapted and geared up. Wipes were common, if not completely expected. When you got good at clearing a zone's bosses though, you got a natural rhythm to it and it always felt good.
Even though I'd consider some of the content to be 'harder' than WoW's, it was also less punishing at the same time. Things like Dynamis or Limbus, where you had a limited time to run around killing hard to get to rare bosses and such still rewarded even just killing trash mobs, kind of like Firelands mob runs before the loot drop rates were nerfed. You'd still get something out of it (normally just currency to put against legendary equivalent items) and it basically lead to a very hard, but laid back feeling game.
Don't get me wrong, some bosses were really stressful, physical damage users had to work together as much as possible to create skill-chains for casters to burst spells on and so on and so forth, but as I said, it created a very rhythmic experience that feels quite mellow. It feels, to me, as though this has carried over to FFXIV too. People do try to rush through dungeons, but they're also accepting of mistakes and are often willing to explain what's what to new players. Also, LFG shouts and gatherings of players in home cities forged a lot of solidarity between the player bases, where you could often be playing through extremely hard content with French or Japanese players and others, the players worked to make it happen together.
I think we learnt a lot of patience and understanding in FFXI and it's encouraged in FFXIV too. So in ways, the game is more hardcore in that it requires more dedication and patience from its players, but is less stressful as a result. Most people playing it are there for the enjoyment, where as in WoW, I feel people get tied up in desperate climbs for loot and have little to no interest in anything else, thus failures become lost time and aggravating, which in itself makes people more angry and less tolerant. Furthermore, FFXI was a multiplayer experience through and through, where you'd group up with people to do even basic things like XP, where as WoW feels more centred on a single player experience, that forces you to play with other people every so often. So when, in WoW, you group up with other people, you feel you have to know everything inside out and there's no room for mistakes, because of the faux elitist atmosphere it's created for itself.
Anyway, that's my inane rambling on the subject.
I think part of it is how the team has designed FFXIV raids. It's largely indicative of what's about to happen and more intuitive to figure out what to do.
Think of WoW where the dev team have gotten to the point that they seem to design raids with the expectation of addons being used to countdown ability, timers for when things are ready, etc, etc.
FFXIV is really refreshing in the lack of addons and the game itself, the fight mechanics, being built in for you to learn them with some visual queues.
Some of the most fun I've had in the game is running new dungeons blind and learning them with a group who has never seen them. I imagine a lot of people feel the same way for raid fights.
I agree with you to some degree, but you still see this sort of mentality the further into content you get. Whereas people may be more than willing to explain something like Titan Hard to you in the middle of a DF before pull, because the fight is relatively easy to bullet point(or even something slightly more complicated like Thornmarch Ex or Leviathan Ex), when you get into fights like T5 or T9 and you see someone say in party "First time, don't know anything about the fight", you'll see a rather negative reaction even though in DF it's pretty much expected that things will go poorly from the start. It may not even be because it's a "lol noob casual" sort of thing, but just because it's somewhat frustrating to sit through a 20 minute queue and then have to even begin to explain a really mechanically complicated fight like T9 to someone who has no clue.
I wouldnt call the FFXIV community hardcore, imo they are a bit more open minded when it comes to what they wanna do with their time. Unlike wow which most of the people I met tended to just go raid or wanting to raid, and pvp. FFXIV tend to help each other out a bit more due to not having to go to alts or out of their way to help others with dungeons, or EX runs etc.
I find this every time I do World of Darkness or honestly any other dungeon finder type content. It's still prevalent.The FFXIV playerbase is much smaller, thus the odds of ADHD kids and epic leavers at the first wipe are much smaller as well. WoW has a shit ton of junk players who bail at the first sign of raid weakness
That said, even those players are pretty "casual" just wanting to get in and get out to get their stuff done ASAP, they're just impatient quitters who have zero accountability and aren't willing to teach new people or lead/ guide them to the right strategy.
The people you met in your group OP, were the opposite of hardcore and the epitome of casual but IMO were belligerent and proud of being a burden to the group. Nothing wrong with learning by doing if everyone is OK with that, but I personally find the willingness of other people to let everyone in the group die so they can learn a mechanic they could have asked about or read about earlier pretty selfish and disrespectful.
TL;DR - no, the FFXIV "community" is not hardcore,
The FF14 community is similar to WoW's. The good players are confined to circlejerk FC's and Linkshells, the raiding community has its even share of decent groups and people who think they're Thall's balls, and the majority are casual players who are more concerned about how uguu-kawaii their cat girl is.
What you said about addons both in WoW and FFXIV is spot-on, in my opinion. That's why I'm extremely concerned about them allowing addons in Heavensward.
The WoW dev team literally said in an interview way back between TBC and WotLK, about a month or so after Sunwell was released, that they certainly do have to design raids with addons in mind or else they would be trivialized. There's also this: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2301722463 (2nd question) In a way, they deliberately leave it up to the players to use add-ons to suppplement what they haven't designed yet.
The reason I think this is bad is because it creates something of an arms race. Players design addons that potentially trivialize raids, devs design raids to challenge those addons, players design addons to deal with this new raid design, devs design raids to challenge those addons. Now look at how ridiculously insane even average raid fights are in WoW ever since Cataclysm. While I did greatly enjoy that challenge all through Cataclysm and Mists, I would never want that kind of MMORPG again.
On the other hand, I really don't think I could ever play a Ninja or Bard at a personally satisfactory level without an addon that's just like TellMeWhen for WoW. :/ And looking at the gameplay designs they have planned for most Jobs in Heavensward, I really fear that my need for a TMW addon is only going to grow more dire.
Last edited by Senka; 2015-05-28 at 06:24 AM.